The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro

The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro
Published May 1989 by Faber and Faber
Source: purchased this one with my own dollars

Publisher's Summary:
Stevens, the perfect butler, and of his fading, insular world in post-World War II England. Stevens, at the end of three decades of service at Darlington Hall, spending a day on a country drive, embarks as well on a journey through the past in an effort to reassure himself that he has served humanity by serving the “great gentleman,” Lord Darlington. But lurking in his memory are doubts about the true nature of Lord Darlington’s “greatness,” and much graver doubts about the nature of his own life.


My Thoughts:
I have been meaning to read this book since I saw the movie adaptation and realized it was based on a book. Last year I finally picked up a copy but then, as with almost every classic book I own. When I realized, at the end of 2019, that I had only read 3, yes 3, classic books all year, I decided I needed to kick off 2020 with a classic and I consider this one a modern classic.

Because I saw the movie before I read the book, I read the entire book hearing Hopkins' voice as Stevens. I was impressed with Hopkins performance when I saw that movie; having now read the book, I'm even more impressed with the way he perfectly captured Stevens in a way I'm not sure any other actor could have.

How to make this quiet, introspective book sound interesting, though, for those of you who may not have seen the movie, who may wonder how a book about a middle-aged man reflecting on his life as  an English butler might be worth picking up? I did what I always do when I'm in a quandary like this - I hit the internet to see what people smarter than me had to saw about the book. I was more than a little surprised to find that not all of the reviews were glowing. And not in the way of "too slow moving for me" or "I just didn't get it."

Kirkus Reviews, for example, had this to say: "...yet there is something doomed about Ishiguro's effort to enlist sympathy for such a self-censoring stuffed shirt, and in the end he can manage only a small measure of pathos for his disappointed servant." What? How could you not feel pathos for a man who has spent his entire life trying to live up to a certain standard, who has spent decades believing he was serving a man worth his admiration, who suddenly discovers that he has wasted his life? But this is Kirkus and I so often disagree with them that I guess I shouldn't be surprised. The people who award the Man Booker Prize disagreed, I guess, since they gave the book their award in 1989.

I'm with the Man Booker Prize people.

It's not a long book but also not a book you can race through. You may feel like it's slow going, as you read. But it's important to pay attention, to absorb what you're reading. You are watching a man wake up to what his life has really been, what he has lost, and what he can do to make his life better. I'm so happy to have started the year with this book; it has set the tone for my reading this year.

This House Is Haunted by John Boyne

This House Is Haunted by John Boyne
Published: October 2013 Other Press
Source: checked out from my local library

Publisher’s Summary:
This House Is Haunted is a striking homage to the classic nineteenth-century ghost story. Set in Norfolk in 1867, Eliza Caine responds to an ad for a governess position at Gaudlin Hall. When she arrives at the hall, shaken by an unsettling disturbance that occurred during her travels, she is greeted by the two children now in her care, Isabella and Eustace. There is no adult present to represent her mysterious employer, and the children offer no explanation. Later that night in her room, another terrifying experience further reinforces the sense that something is very wrong.
 
From the moment Eliza rises the following morning, her every step seems dogged by a malign presence that lives within Gaudlin’s walls. Eliza realizes that if she and the children are to survive its violent attentions, she must first uncover the hall’s long-buried secrets and confront the demons of its past

My Thoughts:
I know it’s weird to read a haunted house story in December and I could have added it to my “save for later” folder on my library account. But I’ve read so many great books this year and I want to make sure I end the year the same way. I felt certain I could count on Boyne to help me do that. He kicked it off with a bang and set the tone:

“London, 1867 - I blame Charles Dickens for the death of my father”

When her already sickly father and Eliza attend a reading by Dickens on a rainy day, her father takes a rapid turn for the worse and shortly thereafter dies, leaving Eliza an orphan who soon realizes that the place she has always called home isn’t actually owned by her father, effectively leaving her homeless. How very Dickensian! Boyne even throws in some social commentary on prison conditions, religion, and the place of women in society to further parallel Dickens’ writing (although, let’s be honest, Dickens never really worried himself over the inequalities that women faced). Dickens isn’t the only author Boyne calls to mind: there are hints of Wilkie Collins, the Bronte sisters (orphaned girl forced to become a governess), and especially Henry James (think The Turn of the Screw). There’s even a paragraph about Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

Boyne went so deep into trying to make this a Gothic mystery that the language often felt stilted (there were a lot of phrases like “answers there came none”) and the descriptions sometimes went on over long, as writers of that time tended to do. Unfortunately, that’s not the extent of my issue with this book. Boyne really ratchets up the violence toward the end of the book, culminating with an actual battle scene that feels more in line with the violence level of a modern thriller than a Gothic one. And where Eliza had been a protected, contented, not over intellectual young woman when the book began, later I often found it hard to believe she was only twenty-one.

Don’t get me wrong – I raced through this book. Even though much of what happens is straight out of the Gothic horror writing textbook, it’s still Boyne. There’s still some humor: “It had been hanging on that wall for so long that perhaps I never really notice it any more, in the way that one often ignores familiar things, like seat cushions or loved ones.” And there are plenty of secrets to be revealed and an ending that you might see coming but I sure didn’t. So should you read it? Sure. It’s not Sarah Water’s The Little Stranger but it’s still a fun read, especially if you read it at near Halloween.

Life: It Goes On - January 26

Happy Sunday!

After three weeks flying solo, The Big Guy is finally home. He was home five whole minutes before we were out the door because he needed to socialize with friends and only a couple of hours longer before we just started watching 2-20 minutes snippets of things on television trying to find something to watch. My neat and tidy home is already back to having towels hung up willy-nilly, blankets just tossed over a chair, and "stuff" everywhere. I'm not saying I didn't miss him but I do already miss the quiet!

Last Week I:

Listened To: I finally finished Africaville and started Ruth Reichl's Save Me The Plums. Reichl is reading it and I am really enjoying it.

Watched: While BG was gone, when the television's been on, it's been on with a purpose. I watched a season of Britain's Interior Design Masters, half of the final season of Orange Is The New Black, and the rest of season 2 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. This weekend BG and I watched Nicholas Nickleby which starred Charlie Hunnam (Sons of Anarchy) and featured so many other well-known names.

Read: I finished The Starless Sea and started Michelle McNamara's I'll Be Gone In the Dark. Because I couldn't read a book about a serial killer when I was home alone in the evenings, I switched that up with more of Leslie Jamison's Make It Scream, Make It Burn. I had gotten of gotten bogged down on that one but it's picked back up again for me.

Made: Spaghetti pie, an updated version of tater tot casserole (even made my own cream of mushroom sauce instead of using a can of soup), and oatmeal butterscotch cookies.

Enjoyed: Lots of time with Miss H, just the two of us. Because she doesn't get home from work until late evening, we often ended up staying up until midnight talking and laughing. Not that we don't spend a lot of time doing those things when BG is home but we amped it up while he was gone.


This Week I’m: 

Planning: It's been too cold to spend much time in the basement the past couple of weeks (our basement is carpeted but doesn't have finished walls so it gets cold down there). This week is supposed to be warmer so I should be able to get back to my reorganizing down there. 

Thinking About: Putting away my snowmen for the year because I'm already over winter after spending some part of every day for a week shoveling snow or scraping off ice.

Feeling: Happy to be headed off shortly to have dinner with some of our oldest friends to celebrate BG's upcoming birthday.

Looking forward to: Book club on Tuesday. We had to reschedule last week because of a forecast of icy moving into our area just about the time we actually started talking about the book. Said iciness, of course, did not move in until after ten.

Question of the week: I'm pretty excited to have the sun shining today; make me a much happier girl. But I know a lot of people really enjoy rainy, cloudy days. Which do you prefer?

Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson

Red at the Bone by Jacqueline Woodson
Read by Jacqueline Woodson, Quincy Tyler Bernstine, Peter Francis James, Shayna Small, Bahni Turpin
Published September 2019 by Penguin Publishing Group
Source: audiobook checked out from my local library

Publisher's Summary: 
Moving forward and backward in time, Jacqueline Woodson's taut and powerful new novel uncovers the role that history and community have played in the experiences, decisions, and relationships of these families, and in the life of the new child.

As the book opens in 2001, it is the evening of sixteen-year-old Melody's coming of age ceremony in her grandparents' Brooklyn brownstone. Watched lovingly by her relatives and friends, making her entrance to the music of Prince, she wears a special custom-made dress. But the event is not without poignancy. Sixteen years earlier, that very dress was measured and sewn for a different wearer: Melody's mother, for her own ceremony— a celebration that ultimately never took place.

Unfurling the history of Melody's parents and grandparents to show how they all arrived at this moment, Woodson considers not just their ambitions and successes but also the costs, the tolls they've paid for striving to overcome expectations and escape the pull of history. As it explores sexual desire and identity, ambition, gentrification, education, class and status, and the life-altering facts of parenthood, Red at the Bone most strikingly looks at the ways in which young people must so often make long-lasting decisions about their lives—even before they have begun to figure out who they are and what they want to be.

My Thoughts:
I am not the least bit surprised to have found this book on 2019 best-of lists. After reading it late in the year, I had to make the difficult decision as to which book on my list of books I loved in 2019 I was moving off the list to make room for this book. It's so good that Edith Wharton, one of my favorite authors, almost had to come off the list. And just what makes it so good, you ask?

Woodson's brilliance is this: she can tell the most layered, emotional story in the fewest words of any writer I've read. This book is only 200 pages long but manages to tell the story of three generations of a family while touching on, as you can see by the summary, so many important themes. In just about 200 pages, Woodson manages to tell the story of three generations and leave readers feeling like they really know these people. She can, even, make readers rethink issues that we've long felt certain about - here a mother who doesn't bond with her daughter. Woodson manages to make Iris not quite the evil woman we mother, in particular, might consider her. She helps readers to understand Iris' choices and allows us to consider the possibility that Melody is better off without Iris as her mother. It's a tough sell but Woodson handles it beautifully.

I clearly recommend this book but I even more strongly recommend the audiobook. The readers are all wonderful; I felt that I was actually listening to people relating their own stories not merely reading a book.